


An imaginary place of total misery

by PrinceDarcy



Category: Kuroshitsuji (2014), Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Genre: Ambiguity, Body Horror, Creepy, Gen, Hell, Horror, I Don't Even Know, I really have no idea what to tag this with, Maybe - Freeform, Nightmares, Not quite nightmares really, it's weird - Freeform, really weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-06
Updated: 2015-02-06
Packaged: 2018-03-10 18:37:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3299708
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrinceDarcy/pseuds/PrinceDarcy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for a drabble prompt.</p><p>Shiori's not sure how she knows it's Hell, but it is as certain to her as the presence of her own hands when she holds them out in front of her face.</p>
            </blockquote>





	An imaginary place of total misery

When she dreams of Hell, it's a stifling white-walled waiting room in a run-down clinic. She's not sure if the setting comes from description or memory, as the place has no context outside of its existence as the _worst place on earth_. The fluorescent lights are all flickering to slightly different rhythms. The chairs are hard, their plastic covers cracked and slippery. There is no nurse at the counter, merely a fax machine that keeps groaning as it spits out sheet after sheet of paper. A cigarette butt smokes in an ashtray on a small coffee table. The sole magazine is in a language Shiori cannot read, nor even recognize as a real language at all.

The clock moves backwards.

People come and go when she dreams of Hell, people of all creeds and colors, ages and genders. A soldier missing a leg will sit next to her and look at a scratched out face in a locket. An old man with slicked-back gray hair will scroll on a tablet that contains no text but insults towards him. A boy barely older than her will carry the motionless body of his elderly mother and lie her down on the seats. A child will drag a burning blanket behind her and ask for her parents. Then they disappear, after some time, through a door. Down a hallway into blackness.

Shiori's not sure how she knows it's Hell, but it is as certain to her as the presence of her own hands when she holds them out in front of her face.

This time her only company is a boy, no older than her. Long overdue for a growth spurt that won't ever come now, still small and slight with lanky limbs and fine features. He's dressed in black, like he's mourning. Slate-colored hair hangs down over his face, partially obscures his single bright blue eye. There's a bandage hastily wrapped over where the other one should be, but it's bleeding through, and she can see the depth of a gap under it. He's missing the thumb and middle finger of his right hand.

He seats himself across the room from Shiori and snatches the magazine off the coffee table. Sitting in the chair, his feet don't touch the floor.

The smoke from the ashtray has been suffocating for a while.

“Boring,” exclaimed in English, is the boy's assessment of the magazine a moment later, and he tosses it back on the coffee table, looking up at Shiori where she sits. Something like a smile, if a smile had a very sinister and rather depressing cousin, touches his face, and she's suddenly conscious of the fact that she isn't wearing her eye-patch.

“The _family curse,_ huh,” the boy says, a distinctly childish curiosity in his tone. “It's worth it, isn't it? In the end. A _grand finale_ to suit the sort of twisted, sordid creature who'd sell themselves to the Devil.”

A pause, then: “You wouldn't know, would you? You're not dead yet.”

“What difference does it make?” she asks, watches the boy cross his legs, rest his hands on his knee like he's a king in his castle. His laughter sounds like glass shattering.

“You'll know when you die. There's really no one coming to save you then. Not even _him._ He was mine first, you know. I broke him in for you.” The boy plucks the smoldering cigarette butt from the ashtray and shoves the end of it against the paper of the magazine until it manages to light. The smoke's already so thick that Shiori would think it would be hard to see, but it's less like she's actually seeing and more like her brain's just telling her what's there. Her chest feels tight, tighter than it even should with her binder on, but the smoke doesn't actually enter her lungs.

She notices cracks in the walls that have never been there before. The cracks in the walls bleed.

“I called him Sebastian too. He killed me.” The boy speaks like he's talking about the weather. There's a nice little fire going on the coffee table. “It _hurt._ Like all the blood in my veins turned to ice. Then it all stopped. I think the stopping hurt worse. He was laughing while I died.”

None of this comes as a surprise, but Shiori finds defenses on her lips nonetheless, pointless justifications that come out as “Sebastian saved me.”

“He does that.” The boy tears the bandage off his eye and tosses it in the little fire. Sure enough, it's gouged out underneath. An empty bloody socket.

“I tried to break our contract. I gave up. I chose to die. I was going to let him have my soul. He saved me anyway.” The words don't really mean anything, because he'd even explained himself— _all the better to eat you, my dear._ The fire's spread quicker than it should. The whole table's burning.

The fax machine sounds an awful lot like someone moaning in pain.

But what Shiori said actually seems to surprise the boy a little, and he blinks the eye that's still there. Then he laughs his silvery fragmented laugh again.

“Us filthy dogs don't have any place understanding the only beasts that are beneath us, do we?” He warms his bloody hands over the consuming fire. “We do our master's bidding and we hold another creature's leash in our teeth. Wild animals always bite. I got _bitten_ while the woman I had to marry was in childbirth. I stuck around like stains on the woodwork. I saw the midwife carry out a little pink wrinkled thing in blankets and find its father's body on the ground. I think she screamed. He'll bite you too, someday. I don't think that kind of creature knows love or loyalty. Or maybe they love with someone's blood in their mouth.”

Shiori pulls her knees up to her chest, keeps her feet away from the flames. “I'm ready to die then the time comes.”

“You're not ready to die. You're ready for what you think dying's like. Speaking of that, though, I think it's my turn.” He stands from his chair and walks right through the flames towards the door. “Good riddance. I've always hated the curtains in this room anyways. And the chandelier's hideous.”

He disappears through the door without another word. Everything is fire in his wake, but when Shiori puts her hand down the seat beneath her feels less like plastic and instead feels warm and wet and slowly beating, like some strange organ.

She wakes up in her room, Sebastian standing at the foot of the bed, and though she knows she dreams of Hell, she wonders where all the demons had gone.

**Author's Note:**

> This is probably the weirdest thing I've ever written.


End file.
